Decided to take my old-school GPL project FreePFM and try an
experiment. Gonna write up some requirements, then implement
it in PHP, Java (JSP + Servlets), J2EE (EJBs), .NET, Java
Swing, and a standalone windows app. All apps will
communicate with the same database. Should make an
interesting project. I've wanted to learn some MS
technologies for a while now, see what they're really like.

BeOS is slick and cool. Unfortunatly, I am having trouble
getting my hardware working properly. Plug and play my ass.
At
least it reboots quickly.

Using BeOS reminds me of being a Macaddict, when everything
was shareware.
Linux has spoiled me, I'm so used to everything, quality or
crap, being free. As in beer.

Koolaid! Just got BeOSinstalled on my Thinkpad.

Except that
it won't recognize my pcmcia network card, which I suppose
makes it basically worthless to me.

I want to start playing around with GUI development to take
a break from all the web design I do. But what environment
to use? Tk means I can use python/perl, but it's ugly. KDE
vs. gnome/gtk? Do I bite the bullet and get VisualC++ just
to see how the other side lives? Maybe java/swing? yerg. so
many choices. I miss my Apple II and getting to choose
between LoRes and HiRes (ok, so you could also choose HiRes
2 and get more screen resolution) modes.

Decided to cure my malaise by novelty. Started learning
Python again with the eventual aim of converting Mason to
python. Don't know if it'll happen, but boy is python a
gorgeous language. I mean, I love perl, but it is so
fugly...And on the OS front, bought myself a copy of BeOS
5.0 to see what's up on that front. Should be fun.

<rant>Has anyone else noticed how little innovation there
really is in the free software community? I mean, I was
browsing sourceforge last night for projects, and realized
i could be:

An issue that I've been struggling with for a while is the
relationship between free software development and
employment as a programmer. I had a problem at my last job
where I finished a perl module and I wanted to release it
to CPAN. Although the work
was done at home, I decided to follow the appropriate
channels. Needless to say, the answer I got was not the
answer I wanted -- my employer owned anything I did on or
off the job that was "related" to my work. Which, of
course, as a web developer, is just about anything. I could
submit the thing to a board for a limited or educational
release licence, but they'd have to evaluate its potential
commercial value first. Beh.

How do people deal with this? Do we just go ahead and do
our GPL projects and hope they never become big/popular
enought that companies try to legally grab them? Do we not
even
bother if we're under the kind of contracts that most
programmers are? Is their a happy medium? No idea...

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